It's strange being a writer sometimes - well, strange a lot of the time. The borders between reality and words become as porous as I believe they are for philosophers. When in life I'm not getting the ending I want, I mean seriously not getting the ending I want, the impulse to rewrite and rewrite until I find the right ending is irrepressible, nightmarish.

HBO’s True Detective is the most exciting program on television right now. The spare elegance and sly existential humour of writer Nic Pizzolatto’s dialogue grabs the breath in your throat and arrests it mid-craw. And the structural complexity of the two-tiered timeline Pizzolatto uses to feed information to the audience, like a multi-hooked fishing line, not only gets your complete attention, but laser-hones your focus onto the story's every nuance.